Mijn Defensie

Mobile & Desktop App

Company

Ministerie van Defensie

My Role

Lead Designer

Tools

Figma Illustrator

Timeline

2023-2024

Description

Maintaining and updating the main portal for employees.

Context

Mijn Defensie is a portal for employees that redirects to different apps and environments. It also functions as news source and alerting app.

A screenshot of a mobile app
A screenshot of a mobile app
A screenshot of a mobile app
A screenshot of a mobile app

Challenge

The challenge was to update the current portal and add new functionalities. Most of the functionalities can be seen as different apps, as they are their own ecosystem and environment. Part of the project was to create a new inbox that can be used as formal communication, and alerting app.

Process

The process started with figuring what needed to be updated. When I started, the app already existed, but needed a refresh and update with new functionalities.

  • Figure out what the users need

  • Plan new functionalities

  • Iterate on current situation

  • Integrate messaging and alerting


Solution

The landing page needed an update, together with the list of apps. The ministry has a huge amount of external portals, apps and other environments that all need to be connected. Our solution to this problem is to have a central portal that is reachable from every device. Users can either use their company phone or the intranet to reach Mijn Defensie. We added a few new functionalities to the app, such as the messaging and alerting app to integrate Mijn Defensie more into the daily work-day. Instead of creating a separate app, we integrated the messaging app into the main portal. This way we were able to alert, message and send notifications to all our users without them having to navigate to a separate messaging app.

Outcome

Currently the app is being used by most of the employees for a few different reasons. The messaging app is rather new, so it's not integrated with every service yet, but soon enough we'll add more and more "clients". For example, the car-reservation system will send messages to users who forgot to charge the electric vehicles. The outcome is a rising number of Mijn Defensie users, and also a more integrated system that can be used by all internal clients.